CONARH, the annual congress of Brazil's human-resources association, is the country's largest gathering on the future of work. The backdrop it convenes against is not the usual optimism of a trade event. It is a set of hard numbers about engagement, mental health, and an alternative model already operating at national scale.
The engagement and health picture is deteriorating
Globally, Gallup's 2025 study put employee engagement at just 20 percent, with an estimated 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity (Gallup, 2025). Latin America fares somewhat better on paper, at 30 percent engaged, with 56 percent of workers thriving in life, the highest in over a decade, a combination that suggests high well-being alongside stubbornly moderate engagement (Gallup, 2026). But the Brazilian health data is alarming. Official social-security figures compiled by the national occupational-medicine association show work absences for mental disorders rising from 219,850 in 2023 to 393,670 through November 2025, with burnout cases roughly tripling from 1,760 to 6,985 and anxiety nearly doubling (ANAMT, 2026). This is the real agenda beneath any HR congress: a workforce that is disengaged and, measurably, getting sicker.
The reflex response misses the mechanism
The conventional HR answer is a wellness program, a resilience app, a mental-health webinar. The evidence keeps saying that treats the symptom. Burnout tracks the structure of work, hours, control, workload, not the worker's coping skill, which is why interventions that change the structure move the numbers and exhortations to be resilient do not. A congress that debates engagement without confronting job design is debating the weather.
Brazil already runs the alternative at scale
What makes the Brazilian context distinctive is that participative governance is not a foreign import here. It is a large, measured sector of the economy. The Brazilian cooperative system reported 25.8 million members across 4,384 active cooperatives in 2024, about 12 percent of the population, generating 578,035 direct jobs, governed on a one-member-one-vote basis (OCB, 2025). Democratic governance of enterprise, the thing HR conferences discuss as a frontier, is institutionalized in Brazil at a scale most countries cannot match. And the country produced the reference case for workplace democracy in the first place, Semco, whose founder documented self-set hours, profit sharing, and open books decades ago (Semler, 1989).
The practical read
The most useful thing CONARH could do is refuse the comfortable framing. The data says Brazilian work is disengaged and its mental-health toll is climbing fast (Gallup, 2025; Gallup, 2026; ANAMT, 2026), which is a structural problem that wellness perks do not touch. And the country has, in its cooperative sector and its own management history, working examples of participative governance at scale (OCB, 2025; Semler, 1989). The agenda that fits the evidence is not another engagement survey. It is the redesign of work, autonomy, participation, sustainable pace, that the numbers, and Brazil's own institutions, already point toward.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Global engagement at 20 percent with an estimated 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Gallup (2026). State of the Global Workplace, Regional Data. Latin America shows 30 percent engagement and 56 percent of workers thriving. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697850/state-of-the-global-workplace-regional-data.aspx
- ANAMT (2026). INSS data on work absences for mental disorders in Brazil. Absences rose from 219,850 in 2023 to 393,670 through late 2025, with burnout roughly tripling. https://www.anamt.org.br/portal/2026/01/27/levantamento-anamt-com-dados-oficiais-do-inss-revela-crescimento-dos-afastamentos-decorrentes-de-problemas-de-saude-mental-entre-2023-e-2025/
- OCB (2025). Anuario do Cooperativismo Brasileiro 2025. Brazil's cooperative sector had 25.8 million members across 4,384 cooperatives and 578,035 direct jobs under one-member-one-vote governance. https://somoscooperativismo.coop.br/anuario
- Semler (1989). Managing Without Managers. Documents Semco's workplace democracy via self-set hours, profit sharing, and open books. https://hbr.org/1989/09/managing-without-managers